Occupy Berkeley protests focus on cuts to education

By eCampus News staff and wire reports

November 17th, 2011

Police arrested 95 Occupy protesters and students Wednesday who stormed into a downtown San Francisco bank and shouted slogans as they tried to set up camp in the lobby, the Associated Press reports. The arrests came after about 100 demonstrators rushed into a Bank of America branch, chanting “money for schools and education, not for banks and corporations.”

Elsewhere, students and anti-Wall Street activists settled into a new encampment at the University of California, Berkeley, and visited the state Capitol to demand the restoration of funding for higher education. At Berkeley, police watched over about two dozen tents that were pitched Tuesday night on a student plaza despite a campus policy that forbids camping. Police warned that protesters could be arrested if they didn’t leave. Seth Weinberg, a 20-year-old cognitive science major, said he slept in a tent on Sproul Plaza to press the university to lobby for more public education funding…